Life — March 2, 1911 — page 12: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“ While there is Life there's Hope." VOL. LVI, MARCH 2, 1911, No. 1479 Published by LIFE PUBLISHING COMPANY JA MITCHELL, Prev A. MILLER, Secy and Treas 17 West Thirty-first Street, New York HE — adminis- tration seems to think we could get along at a pinch without so many _ periodicals to entertain and instruct us. It pro- poses, as everybody must know by this time, to quadruple the present rate of postage on the advertising part of the magazines and periodicals. This would hit the low and middle price magazines pretty hard. How hard it would hit them is disputed. In behalf of the Post-Office it is represented that an undue share of the postal re- ceipts is used up in handling “ second- class matter”—newspapers and pe- riodicals—which do not nearly pay the cost of hauling and handling them. A low rate of postage was estal newspapers and magazines in the in- terest of popular education, and the cost of it has always been patiently borne. But now, the Department says, magazines with enormous circula- tions carrying often much more ad- vertising than other reading matter, deluge the postal service and derive huge profits from a trafic of which a large part of the cost falls, under pres- ent laws, on the Government. The Department holds that there is no just reason why these profitable business concerns should be subsidized by the Government, substituting postal defi- cits for profits and delaying the reduc- tion of letter postage. It thinks they ought to pay their way, if not entirely, at least upon so much of their bulk as is devoted to advertising. To which the periodicals reply that they are not making hordes of moncy, but that the most successful of them are making very modest profits and the rest are lucky if they are able to ale 2 keep their heads above water; that the magazine business has been overdone anyway; that it is as absurd to dis- criminate in postage rates against the advertising end of the magazine, as it would be for a doctor to discriminate against the stomach of a patient and in favor of brain; that it is the advertising that makes possible the distribution of fifteen-cent magazines of the quality now given at the price now received; that the periodicals, directly and indirectly, bring more money into the Post-Office than they take out of it; that they pay plenty enough already, and that the real basis of the effort now making to raise postage rates on the magazines is po- litical, and due to wrath and fear of the muck-rake information that vari- ous magazines and weekly papers have disseminated. So the periodicals have cried out in big newspaper advertise- ments to their readers that a plot is afoot to destroy them, and they have appealed to the people not to suffer them to be destroyed. @) WE don’t believe at all that the President and Mr. Hitchcock are out to squelch the muck-rakers. Mr. Hitchcock has done well by the postal service, and wants to do better. He and Mr. Taft think the periodicals ought to pay their own costs of dis- tribution, and on the face of it that looks right. But the question is not merely whether the magazines are get- ting from the Post-Office more than they pay for; neither is it at all con- cerned with what sort of political doc- trine they preach, and whether or not their stories are edifying. It is a ques- tion of business, and a big one. Will it pay the people of the country to increase the rate of second-class mail? Will it pay business? Will it even pay the Post-Office? The periodicals and their advertising are an impor- tant part of the business machinery of the country, They are great sell- ers of goods. Lines of business have grown up which are very consid- erably dependent upon them as selling agents, and no business is more pro- moted by them than the profitable letter-carrying business of the Post. Office. As to that, Mr. Brisbane makes an apt comparison when he compares Mr. Hitchcock's effort to make second- class mail more profitable, to the effort of a manager of an office building to make his elevators self-supporting. It might be done by charging so much a ride, but as Mr. Brisbane says in large type, “IT WOULD RUIN THE INCOME OF THE BUILDING.” At any rate, this matter of raising the second-class rates is serious, and there are a good many sides to it, and very considerable consequences both immediate and remote. It is a change which should not be made without thorough consideration and discussion and due notice to all concerned. Its results are uncertain. Its advantages are speculative. Its inconveniences are sure. At best, it would involve a lot of readjustment, which would take time and cost money. We do not be- lieve that Congress will authorize the change without much fuller knowledge of what it is doing than it has yet, nor that any change will be authorized which is so much open to assault, both as inequitable and as unprofitable, as the one proposed. Some of the fifteen-cent political magazines and some of the weekly papers, Lire, for example, scem to us exceedingly important vehicles of political and other education to the people. The best of them have won an extraordinary place for them- selves in the minds of American voters. They have not been without faults and errors of fact, judgment and temper, but they have offered to students of current politics.a vast deal of mighty instructive reading, such as is not ca: come by in the news- papers, We should be sorry to sce their present status disturbed or their independence affected by Government action. We belicve it is possible to “work out the problem of postal rates so that the solution will be accepted as just by all fair-minded people, in- cluding the publishers of magazines. No doubt the establishment of a par- cels post, which seems sure to come, and soon, will help to solve such a so- lution. But the sudden and radical change now proposed seems to ue neither just nor expedient. comicbooks.com